New data obtained by KCL UCU shows that our university’s investment in companies implicated in human rights abuses and violations of international law is getting worse. For example, between 2024 (Q2) and 2025 (Q3) there was a 17% increase in the value of KCL’s endowment invested in companies named by the UN as doing business in illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In the same period, KCL’s investment in military-surveillance-tech company Palantir almost quadrupled. This comes after the rejection of our formal submission to KCL Council’s Finance Committee last year to reform the university’s Ethical Investments Policy in order to prevent investment of KCL’s endowment in companies that support genocide, particularly in Palestine. This also comes after the formal trade dispute that KCL UCU has opened with management, which includes a demand for divestment. This is also happening alongside increased repression of protest on campus, including the shameful indefinite suspension of our student Usama Ghanem, whose visa has now been revoked.

Currently, approximately £220 million of KCL’s endowment fund is invested through multiple funds into around 1700 companies. Data on the specific companies invested in by these funds is not made publicly available on the KCL website. However, we have obtained from management several of these lists, updated since 2023. The latest data we have seen is from October 2025. This shows increases in endowment investment in several types of companies that our members believe need to be challenged.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has a list of companies that operate in Israeli settlements (which the ICJ’s advisory ruling of July 2024 states have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law). Major expansions of these settlements are continuing. Updated in 2023, the UNHCR list contains 97 international and Israeli companies. As of 2024 (Q2), King’s College London’s endowment was invested (through fund managers) in 9 of these companies, to a total of £295,704. The companies are: AirBnb, Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, Booking.com, Expedia, Israel Discount Bank, Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, Motorola and Alstom. This was part of the data that KCL UCU presented to the Finance Committee in June 2025, where divestment from the companies was proposed and rejected. After our representation to Council, subsequent data (from October 2025) shows that the total amount of this investment has increased to £345,794 – a 17% increase.

In 2024, KCL’s Ethical Investments Policy was amended to prevent direct or indirect investment “in companies deemed to be engaged in controversial weapons” (e.g. white phosphorous, depleted uranium, landmines etc). However, Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza have not primarily involved the use of ‘controversial weapons’, relying instead on ‘conventional’ munitions. The current KCL Ethical Investment Policy does not prohibit KCL from investing its endowment into companies that supply conventional weapons to states implicated in war crimes or human rights abuses.

Beyond this, data analytics, artificial intelligence and drones for surveillance and targeting have been central to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as targets for assassination, using AI targeting systems with little human oversight and an extremely permissive policy for civilian casualties. Data mining and surveillance technology companies such Palantir are key providers of AI technology to the Israeli military and have expressed public support for Israel on numerous occasions. When we presented this data to Council, we knew that KCL had a £42,243 investment in Palantir. As of October 2025 this had almost quadrupled to £159,596. Genocide is clearly good for business for companies like Palantir. And as its share price rises, this is reflected in increases in investment by the type of funds that KCL’s endowment uses. Beyond these examples, earlier research conducted by the KCL BDS Forum estimated a total of around £20 million in investments of the KCL endowment into a wider range of complicit companies. The recent data discussed here shows that these trends are increasing.

In the broader context of the genocide, specific endowment investments in individual companies may sometimes seem small. But if global corporations (like Maersk) can make decisions to divest/delink from companies such as those on the settlements ‘blacklist’, then why can’t a university like KCL, whose public mission is to ‘make the world a better place’?

KCL management says that beyond the ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ criteria applied by each of the investment funds (excluding fossil fuels, tobacco, ‘controversial weapons’ etc), there’s no mechanism to screen out investment in companies on the UN settlement blacklist, or companies like Palantir. This means that the wider KCL community has no way of meaningfully influencing where/how the endowment is invested. As KCL UCU, we can’t accept this.

Our branch balloted on our formal dispute in October/November 2025 and over 70% of voting members said they were willing to take strike action on this and other issues relating to governance at KCL. We missed the turnout threshold by 1% and the branch is currently building a wider campaign towards a reballot to give us a mandate for collective action for the next academic year. We will likely need the leverage of industrial action to push management to reforming the endowment investment model. This would have to include the addition of further investment exclusions (e.g. on human rights and international law grounds). To make such exclusions enforceable there would also likely need to be a move towards direct investment through a single fund manager, over which mechanisms could be created for staff input into decisions about the ethical use of the endowment.

Thursday 12 February is the National Workplace Day of Action for Palestine and we will be joining students and UNISON in a walkout and rally outside the Strand campus at 12pm. To discuss and plan our campaigning on these issues, this will be immediately followed by a townhall meeting at 1.30pm in Waterloo JCMB 105 (and online). Come along to participate in planning how we can take collective action for meaningful worker engagement in how our university is run!

KCL UCU is formally balloting its members over a trade dispute that is, at its heart, about glaring contradictions in King’s College London’s official stance of ‘values-based impartiality’, a democratic deficit in university governance, and a lack of commitment to protect and improve staff working conditions. Our branch believes that these issues impacting staff working conditions are interlinked with the position of the university in a wider context of increased global militarism, the international normalisation of genocide, the ongoing rise of the far right, and the crisis of funding in UK higher education. Please read about the interrelated components of this dispute below, and cast your vote.

What are the demands of this dispute and how have they evolved?

KCL UCU has been in formal dispute with King’s management since March 2025 over its failure to adequately protect the wellbeing and academic freedom of staff who have been targeted by hostile students because of their solidarity with Palestine. Harassers who have targeted our members through hate demonstrations, media doxxing and the creation and sharing of unauthorised classroom recordings have faced no clear sanction from the university. At the same time, staff who have been targeted (including a Palestinian colleague from Gaza) have faced protracted, harmful and mishandled investigations and disciplinary procedures relating to private social media activity. They have now been fully exonerated, but the process has raised serious questions about the KCL’s willingness to subject staff to this form of harm and its failure to recognise the politically motivated abuse of complaint procedures.

For over a year, the branch has been calling on management to take robust steps in order to prevent any further harassment. We are demanding that management issue a clear public statement reaffirming KCL’s commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism, and the protection of its community from intimidation, harassment and discrimination. We have also been demanding the establishment of an independent investigation into the mishandling of the complaints procedure in these cases.

Through 2025, it has become increasingly clear that management’s failures to protect staff are a result of KCL’s wider silence and complicity in the genocide in Gaza. KCL invests in and takes sponsorship from companies implicated in war crimes, and has likely been teaching military personnel from armed forces implicated in the same. As such, the branch has demanded that a clause be added to contracts at KCL that would allow employees to conscientiously object to participation in any activity connected with the military, the arms trade, fossil fuels and genocide.

KCL claims ‘values based impartiality’, but it refuses to take any steps to divest from companies which are demonstrably enabling the genocide in Gaza and the oppression of the Palestinian people (e.g. companies listed as supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank that the UK government considers to be in violation of international law). Such investments and other institutional links compromise an ever greater number of members’ beliefs, academic freedom, and concerns about complicity in war crimes, constituting a widespread curtailment of terms and conditions of employment.

Failures to protect staff and institutional complicity in war crimes are also a result of the democratic deficit in KCL’s governance structures and an increasing unwillingness to engage with the union on major policy changes. We are therefore returning to the demand of our unresolved 2023 local dispute that KCL Council must have at least 50% of its members as elected staff.

We are also demanding a pause in the implementation of ‘King’s Strategy 2030’ in order for full consultation to take place. As part of that consultation, UCU would be demanding a commitment to no compulsory redundancies as a result of this strategy, and a commitment in the strategy for improvements in staff terms and conditions. This would include reducing casualisation, providing specific support for migrant members, and implementing workload improvements (all of which were recommendations from the joint working groups from our 2023 local dispute, but have yet to be implemented meaningfully).

These different issues are linked by the problems of an intransigent management that is increasingly hostile to consultation and negotiation, and a lack of democratic governance at KCL. We can and should revisit our previous local disputes in light of two major developments: the genocide in Palestine and the national crisis in higher education. The latter has created a context in which universities have become dependent on relationships that tie them to militarism and disincentivise their divestment from companies implicated in war(crimes).

Where is the branch with negotiations on these demands?

As of early October 2025, management’s response to the branch’s demands are as follows:

–        Management has offered no new policy on safeguarding staff or a commitment to a public statement on academic freedom, anti-racism, and the protection of its community from intimidation, harassment and discrimination.

–        As a result of the failure to progress complaints correctly, UCU has demanded a  fully independent review of the process and the broader issues of harassment, intimidation, and academic freedom. Management have so far refused to commission such a review.

–        Management has opposed adding a clause to contracts at KCL that would allow employees to conscientiously object to participation in any activity connected with the military, the arms trade, fossil fuels or genocide. There was recognition that, in some cases, reasonable adjustments for protected beliefs are necessary.

–        Management have refused to reopen negotiations on our demands for KCL divestment from companies profiting from genocide in Palestine, with the explanation that the decision on this was already made by Council (which rejected all of our detailed recommendations in June).

–        Management has rejected the demand that Council should have at least 50% of its members as elected staff. Again, the explanation is that Council itself has already decided how to implement recommendations for increasing staff representation from the 2023 independent Governance Effectiveness Review (we argue that these recommendations didn’t go far enough, and that even these recommendations were not fully implemented by Council, in that no new process for engaging participation of the full KCL community was established).

–        Management won’t commit to pausing the King’s Strategy 2030 in order for full consultation to take place, to rule out compulsory redundancies or to undertake to include improvements to staff terms and conditions (e.g. recommendations from the previous dispute’s working group) within these plans.

Will the branch take industrial action over these demands?

A strong ‘yes’ vote for  industrial action would give our branch negotiators significantly more leverage with management to make progress on these demands. There is scope within the demands for us to make tangible gains and reach an agreement that is acceptable to our members and opens up space for much broader future consultation and engagement with management on major institutional change at King’s.

If we achieve a ‘yes’ vote, we would take the question of specific industrial action to a branch general meeting for discussion. Branch democracy has been central to the formulation and development of this dispute over the last year, and the branch will continue to engage directly with members about the negotiations and the form or timing of any industrial action. The branch has had experience and success with industrial action before, even when balloting alongside a national ballot: our 2023 local dispute won important benefits for our members, such as a childcare subsidy and the achievement of the highest London Weighting Allowance among universities in the capital.

There is still much ‘unfinished business’ from the 2023 local dispute – particularly around the implementation of working group recommendations that would benefit the huge proportion of academic staff who are on casualised fixed term contracts (around 42% of faculty staff), or migrant members facing spiralling visa fees with no real assistance from the university. These issues are taken up in our current updated dispute because we are demanding that management consult with UCU to incorporate the implementation of previously agreed working group recommendations into their institution-wide planning (e.g. Strategy 2030). Although the unions-management Recognition Agreement that we won in 2023 entitles us to meaningful consultation on all of these issues, this simply isn’t happening at the moment. This is why we need new leverage to put all of these issues back on the table.

Support your negotiators, and vote ‘YES’

VOTE to show management that you’ll take a stand for academic freedom and the safety of colleagues at KCL!

What is this dispute about? What are the demands?

In March, KCL UCU formally notified management of a Trade Dispute over the College’s failure to safeguard staff, its mishandling of complaints procedures, and its failure to protect academic freedom. This relates to a prolonged campaign of targeted harassment and intimidation against staff, involving the abuse of KCL’s complaints system, doxing of staff and students, unauthorized recordings of teaching shared with right-wing media, targeted harassment and intimidation at rallies, and death threats. For example, our members have been named by students as ‘supporters of terrorism’ in interviews with Nigel Farage on GB News. Others have had their names and photos circulated, with protests organised outside KCL calling for them to be ‘banned’, sacked and deported. External far-right organisations have been directly involved in this targeted harassment, including Betar, a group included in the Anti-Defamation League’s ‘glossary of extremism and hate’.

The Branch has demanded that management (1) Safeguards staff who have been targeted for their pro-Palestine positions; (2) Issues a clear public statement reaffirming the College’s commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism, and the protection of its community; and (3) Commissions an independent review of the handling of the complaints procedure and related investigations over the last 18 months.

Our dispute is focused on protecting our members who have been targeted and remain under investigation. This dispute is also about our wider workplace conditions, which depend on academic freedom for all of us who teach and enable learning at KCL. If we are aggressively targeted by those who disagree with our views, and secretly record us and our students in the supposedly safe space of the classroom – will our employer step up to protect us? The war on Gaza has brought these issues to the fore over the last year, but there are so many other contentious issues – reproductive rights, trans inclusion, for example – that we need to be able to discuss safely in our classrooms without fear of harassment.

How have the negotiations gone?

Management have refused an external assessment of the (mis)use of Report and Support, instead offering UCU some (undefined) input into the terms of reference/scope of an internal review. Management have indicated some willingness to issue a joint statement after the conclusion of ongoing relevant investigations into staff and student conduct. Management have also said that any further actions in regard to demand no.1 will depend on the outcome of these investigations. However, it is important to emphasise that these investigations are not just focusing on students who have targeted our members, but also on those members themselves (including colleagues from Gaza whose family members have been killed). Their writing and social media content is being investigated – and potentially criminalised – by the College, including content from years before they were even employed by KCL. Repeated delays in the investigations have harmed our members and has left the branch questioning the integrity, confidentiality and capacity of these processes. More broadly, the failure of the College to take prompt action against harassers has allowed this campaign of intimidation to escalate over the last year and affect an ever increasing  number of staff.

What’s the bigger picture here? 

As spaces for critical debate, universities are under numerous forms of attack worldwide. These include populist right-wing targeting of scholars focused on social justice, government attacks on international students, along with worsening threats to funding. King’s is failing to protect our community and we believe that institutional double standards have been on display in its response to the student Encampment calling for institutional divestment from war crimes in Palestine. The Encampment students were immediately threatened with non-academic misconduct charges. One has been excluded while an investigation take places into their involvement in a May protest against a KCL-hosted event that was sponsored and supported by arms/security companies that enable war crimes in Gaza, alongside explicitly pro-Israel lobby groups. By contrast, none of the students who have publicly threatened our members and targeted them – by name and with photos – in hate demonstrations on campus have been formally warned, suspended or excluded pending the outcome of investigations into their conduct.

Also relevant to our dispute, we should remember that the Encampment was policed by management using a new protest policy that was adopted last year with no consultations with the campus unions or staff. And while KCL follows an untenable policy of ‘values based neutrality’ (again, formulated without any consultation with trade unions), it continues to invest in arms-technology companies and other firms implicated in violations of international law and human rights abuses.

But this dispute is not just about Palestine – it’s also  about how the College chooses to protect its staff who teach and research on a huge range of contentious and difficult topics, and how it protects the safe space of our classrooms for our entire community.

What’s a consultative ballot? If I vote, does this mean we’ll go on strike?

This online consultative ballot asks you whether you share the Branch’s concerns about management’s protection of academic freedom on campus and whether you would want to hold a formal industrial action ballot if the issues raised by the current dispute are not resolved swiftly. Depending on the results of the consultative ballot (and continuing negotiations and national UCU approval) we could move to a full postal ballot that would give the branch a mandate to undertake some form of industrial action, e.g. ‘action short of a strike’ (ASOS), or strike action.

Why should I vote?

Members should vote in order to participate in union workplace democracy. Like the decision to open the formal dispute itself, the decision to hold this consultative ballot was reached through debate and voting among members at our monthly General Meetings (which are open to all). The consultative ballot now puts these issues to the whole membership. Although the branch has communicated to members about these problems for the last 18 months, because this is a dispute about multiple individual cases and ongoing investigations, it is often difficult for the branch executive to share information that would give the full picture of the severity of the issues. But we have been sufficiently concerned about management’s handling of these cases (and the wider implications of this for all of us) to have launched this dispute. Negotiations continue, our members are still under threat, and our negotiators need a strong message from our wider membership to push management to take meaningful action and protect our colleagues. Please use your vote to help us!

What can I do to support the campaign?

Making sure that our wider membership is aware of the issues and the importance of this ballot is no small task! As with any ballot, the branch needs volunteers to help get the vote out. If you are willing and able to join the volunteer group, please let us know ASAP at ucu@kcl.ac.uk.

Even if you can’t join the volunteer team, having conversations with colleagues about the ballot and the issues explained above can make a huge difference to turnout.

Please vote, please discuss with your colleagues, and please help us show management that they need to do much more to protect academic freedom staff safety at KCL!